Book Notes: A fateful journey in The Lighthouse’

“The Lighthouse” is a short, orderly novel that, despite its uncomplicated narrative and brevity, is a skillfully written, unsettling story of inescapable fate. The haunting sense of inevitability makes this a page-turner not easily forgotten. Alison Moore’s novel, just released in the United States, has been lauded by critics and shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.

The story is about Futh, a thin, pale man of middle age with thinning, mousy hair. He travels from England to Germany for a weeklong walking holiday. He’s planned every detail of his circular route so that he can walk 15 miles a day, arriving each afternoon at his next hotel, his suitcase waiting for him in his room. While he’s off on this holiday, his angry, disenchanted soon-to-be ex-wife is packing up his belongings and shipping them to his new apartment.

There is a circularity to the plot, to the walkabout and to Futh’s fate. This circularity is tied at a deeper and more subconscious level to Futh’s mother who abandoned him when he was 11-years-old. He always carries a small, silver lighthouse that once belonged to her. When the lighthouse is taken from him, he crosses boundaries and disregards consequences.

Futh travels concentric paths — the larger walk of fate and the lesser path of daily insults that make up the sum total of his existence. Even on holiday he cannot sidestep the endless trickle of mishaps, the repulsive seductress, the disappointments and humiliations. And even though Futh gets lost amid the daily string of mishaps, nothing is going to derail his larger, fated journey.

Futh’s American mother found her husband boring and dull. She seemed to have little regard for Futh, either, saying a rushed goodbye and disappearing forever amid a cloud of cigarette smoke. Futh was left with “Scent of Mother” — her woolen skirts and leather shoes and lingering cigarette smoke, and that small silver lighthouse that once held a rare and expensive perfume made of violets. Futh went on to make his living manufacturing synthetic scents. If there is a secret language spoken among this novel’s characters, it is scent — trigger of poignant memory and seemingly irrational behaviors.

Futh starts and ends his walkabout at Hellhaus hotel, owned and operated by Ester and Bernard. Ester takes care of bookings, patrons and the cleaning of rooms, while Bernard runs the bar. Hellhaus, which translates as “bright house” or “light house,” can be gorgeous and incandescent when viewed in the moonlight or at sunset. What happens inside is anything but gorgeous. Ester and Bernard’s bond is hostile, violent and practically wordless.

Moore’s characters are quietly, insistently repulsive. Ester, once attractive to men, has gone past her prime. She is fleshy and overdramatized in appearance. Her hair is too blond. Her makeup is too thick. Her clothes are too tight and too short. Nor does Bernard let her forget her physical failings. She seduces male patrons in wordless haste and Bernard, aware of these stealth assignations, exacts revenge.

Gloria, another aging seductress, comes onto Futh beginning when he’s a teenager. She is tireless in the ways she crosses Futh’s boundaries. Her son, Jimmy, grows to despise Futh, though they were once childhood friends. At a chance encounter in a bakery, Jimmy pokes his finger into a sticky bun and then into the icing on one of the cakes. Futh inadvertently buys one of the sticky buns with Jimmy’s fingerprint and decides he has to eat it.

When Futh sets out on his holiday, he finds himself thinking about a similar trip he took with his cold, abusive father a year after his mother abandoned them. But Futh’s return to Germany is more to facilitate his wife’s need to get him out of their house than to take time off. Moore writes, “(Futh’s) heart feels like the raw meat it is. It feels like something peeled and bleeding. It feels the way it felt when his mother left.” By the end of the walking trip, his feet are raw and bleeding, too.

Futh’s holiday is anything but. Walking a loop from and back to Hellhaus feels exactly like a noose tightening, one blistered step at a time. A storm blows in and out, writes Moore at the onset of Futh’s journey. The storm is brief and perhaps a bit violent. By morning, there’s “very little evidence of damage.” Moore may be writing about the weather or maybe she’s thinking about the hotel’s sparring proprietors, Bernard and Ester. A slathering of makeup disguises any damage to Ester’s face. Or maybe it’s Futh, found dull and forgettable by those meant to love him.

— Rae Padilla Francoeur is a freelance journalist and author. She can be reached at rae@raefrancoeur.com.

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